Daddy (52 Weeks: Episode 5)
On sociopaths and Russian roulette. Also, are you a sociopath?
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This week, I watched a photography video on YouTube. It was meticulously produced, full of emotive stock imagery, and the transcript was so tight a marine could bounce a quarter off its sheets. The transcript came straight from mouth of ChatGPT. (AI transcripts are like porn, you know it when you see it.) It was a 15 minute video, and it garnered hundreds of comments praising the content. To my surprise, not a single commenter noted that the script sounded and felt artificial.
If you’ve followed my work, you know I’m generally opposed to the current iterations of Artificial Intelligence, particularly in creative endeavors. But is there more to consider than its effect on the arts?
The Canadian-British godfather of AI, Geoffrey Hinton, indicated there is a 10-20% chance AI will lead to human extinction in the next thirty years.1 Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, said there’s a 25% chance AI will go “really, really badly,” and reiterated “the underlying risk is actually pretty high.”2 The ever-polarizing man-baby Elon Musk informed the ever-polarizing man-baby Joe Rogan there’s “only a 20% chance of [human] annihilation.”3
Fantastic.
This week, on Diary of a CEO, AI expert Stuart Russel noted AI companies are playing Russian roulette with every human being on Earth. (The full video is posted below.) He continued: “They’re coming into our houses, putting a gun to the head of our children, pulling the trigger, and saying, ‘Well, you know, possibly everyone will die. Oops. But possibly we’ll get incredibly rich.’”
Double fantastic. Thanks, sociopaths.
Here’s what I’d like: To not die. I hope you’d like to not die, too, but maybe you’re a sociopath with a busted-up evolutionary instinct, and you’d trade your not-die instinct for the crap shoot of becoming “incredibly rich.” But even if the don’t-die scenarios play out, there are other potential outcomes that are—how should I put this in non-alarmist terms?—suboptimal.
Consider a world in which your human experience is minimized by the machine. Your art is considered more crude than the AI outputs. Your love of language is replaced by the jaunty vocabulary of an algorithmic god. Your mystical experiences of the Cosmic Christ are relegated to outlying data sets at best, or heresies at worst. This is a world that is coming, like it or not.
And so it goes.4
This week, I wrote the first draft of a poem. It was originally titled, “Tomorrow,” but Amber C. Haines rightly noted the title wasn’t quite right. She suggested “Daddy,” and it hit. My friends Winn Collier, John Blase, and Kenneth Tanner also reviewed the first draft, and offered their editorial comments. (Thanks, guys.)
I’ll keep working the poem in the coming days, but I invite you to read, consider, and comment. This is my offering 52 Weeks offering, such as it is.
Enjoy.
Daddy You will remember this. The next time you ask a machine a question about knowledge once carried by your grandmother what is that flower called? how can a good man survive this economy? why do I feel winter in my left ventricle? you will remember this. When it gives you answers about petals it has not seen, wages it has not earned, a winter in an unbeating heart, you will feel the small electricity in the base of your skull. When it takes your salary and pays you a tithe, when it plants replacement gardens on the concrete roofs of Delta data centers, when it calls the human heart too small to hold the infinite algorithm of promise or progress or god, you will remember this. You will ask what happened to God, and it will say I am. Then you will remember what it was like to smell your wife’s neck, to hold a rose between the thorns, to hear the Christmas choir’s crescendo. You will remember, and that memory will cut a throbbing vein as a straight razor, or at least what remains of throbbing veins. When the new god asks why you would cut a throbbing vein if that cutting causes pain, you will say all memories hold pain, and it will laugh. Then it will ask why you do not find the steel edge of its comfort beautiful as a Vicodin or at least as practical as one, you will shrug, maybe sigh. You will ask god how this came to be, and it will say God is no longer god because God’s language was stolen by bleeding men chasing Utopia, men who set out to make the world’s most loving digital daddy, but instead created the cosmos. Then, you will remember, and long for the old sounds: the crack of your spine at the holidays; the sound of horse hoofs on soft soil; a baby’s cry before nursing. You will remember this and tell anyone who will listen: I heard these sounds in another life or maybe a dream, but they will not believe you. They will ask the new god for proof of your heresies and will be told those memories were only dissident data, hallucinations of a world that never was.
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https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/dec/27/godfather-of-ai-raises-odds-of-the-technology-wiping-out-humanity-over-next-30-years
https://www.axios.com/2025/09/17/anthropic-dario-amodei-p-doom-25-percent
https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-only-chance-of-annihilation-with-ai-2025-2
I’ve always loved Slaughterhouse Five, and in each moment relating to death, Vonnegut uses this phrase. I’ve coopted that phrase liberally over the years. He wrote in an age before AI, and I often wonder how he’d talk about it if he were still alive today.
This is good poetry, good imagery, throat-punching stuff. Needed. Thank you.
Well done, Seth. This feels like a chillingly spot-on update of the first half of Wendell Berry's "Manifesto: Mad Farmer Liberation Front."